Ask HN: Where would you publish content that should outlive you?
I would love for my great grandchildren to be able to read the things I write today, and see the photos I’ve taken.
Where should I publish them?
Dedicated hosting and domain are a missed payment away from being purged.
So is iCloud.
Facebook and Tumblr are a bankruptcy away to join Geocities and MySpace.
Own physical bedroom server requires maintenance which can’t be done when you’re dead.
The average dead person’s content isn’t easy to monetize.
Buy a lifetime sdf.org membership for $36 and publish everything there is the best I can come up with. But that’s predicated on trust.
How would you solve this?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 81.6 ms ] threadThis may not be the answer you want but I am skeptical of any website being around for very long. I would get something that can control a chipping and etching tool capable of carving designs and words into extremely hard rock, then find caves that go deep into mountains that are at a high altitude to leave behind whatever was on my mind. The reason I would go for high altitude is plate subduction or ocean level sea rise could submerge some caves at or near sea level. I would avoid soft rock caves and instead try to find very hard rock and mountains that contain massive solid slabs of rock vs. layers of different elements that could easily shatter on impact from asteroids. Some may consider this graffiti however explorers in the distant future may find it interesting. Just like parity data I would repeat my carvings in many caves as some will be destroyed. I would then make videos and pictures of my etchings and upload them to the websites and archives that may be around for a couple decades. This is probably just me, but I would never pay a site to keep something around. Businesses fold every day that were pinky-promised to be around for lifetimes.
If you are 25 today (2024) you might have adult children in 25 years time; adult grandchildren in another 25 years and great grandchildren 10 years after that (in 2084).
The internet, URL's and websites will be very different by then. Think about the world 60 years ago (1964). This was around the time that 7400 series TTL integrated circuits were released.
How much of your early digital history are still readable today? You might have a box full of 3.5 inch floppy discs but can you still read them.
In short, unless you have a string family history of digital archivists I would only trust paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper
I recently wanted to retrieve my PhD (2000). It was on a disquette, I found the correct reader and had high hopes to connecting it to a contemporary PC.
The thing is that I could not find the disquette anymore, despite being sure it is "there"
I have been mostly successful in capturing the files but I have a bunch that are in a format that I no longer have software to read.
I lot is in folders with at least a year in their names but otherwise unprocessed. Lots of duplication. No effective way to find things I might have lost.
I encrypted some stuff but lost track of the keys and the software to decrypt so that data is now lost.
Either that or write something really good, so people want to read it, so they will keep paying for it to be published over and over again.
I think the first option is actually a lot easier.
we've been able to store information even before being able to write things down! and the methods of recalling the information keep themselves up to date, no need to maintain esoteric codecs
contrast to other species' instincts/learned behaviors, personally i think the ability to only remember the relevant/interesting parts is a feature, not a bug
I can guarantee that Netlify [insert other freemium hosting providers] will eventually die sooner than you think.
If you can throw enough money at the problem and are in the US, set up a trust to host your content for as long as the funds last.
If not you could bet on The Internet Archive to outlive you (and maybe donate to them).
But I think the bigger issue than hosting is discoverability. How will your great grandchildren find your content even if it was still available?
To cover both issues the best bet is to focus on somehow convincing your offspring on keeping your content and memory alive in what ever way they see fit, enough so that they pass it on. I have no ideas for exact details here, maybe someone else does?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065088
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41584922
How about just putting the things onto a USB disk, or several of them, for redundancy purposes? One hopes JPEG and PDF (or HTML) will be around for another 100 years. No guarantees for USB though, the USB standard might be USB 3.2 Gen 17x69 Rev 42 Type Q in a few years.
For example https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/cd/archival-gr...
A great site explaining the differences in discs is https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
https://www.familysearch.org/memories/
It's a service provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (of which I'm a member), which considers preserving family history to be a core tenet. To the point of storing family history records in the Granite Mountain Vault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Mountain_(Salt_Lake_Co...)
tenet:
a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy.
tenant:
a person who occupies land or property rented from a landlord.
Then you need an organization that’s going to care about your writings and photos.
Maybe this is your children and your children are going to then do whatever it takes to maintain your writings and the family photo album just like generations have done.
The only way for things to outlive you is for you to have something that other people want to continue to work on or consume.
That’s literally the only way
If your iCloud account (or whatever) goes abandoned, then a corporation who doesn’t care at all about you is just going to delete your account and all of your information unless you continue to have a commercial transaction with them.
Maintaining a commercial transaction means someone maintains a bank ledger that can support that.
Maintaining a bank ledger that you can support that after you die means that you have some person who is maintaining that managing it maintaining the relationship with the bank, etc…
The writings of Rumi are going to continue to promulgate throughout the Earth, long after Rumi’s death because other people care what they say, and it was encoded in a form and distributed in a way that a lot of people decided to take it
If you cannot create that kind of momentum, then there’s nothing you can do technologically that maintain that
Do something worth doing and it Might be maintained
I’ll give you my personal example of this: I, along with Dave West, Bryce Johnson, Ben Hedges totally re-created 97.7 KAFA the radio station for the United States Air Force Academy from 2006-2008. Prior to me taking over as music Director and later general manager, we had no presence on the Internet. We had no coverage in the Colorado Springs area. We had no formatting. We had nothing structural, we had nothing institutional. Our funding was basically zero and there was no ability for us to maintain or grow.
Over the ensuing 2 1/2 years of work I led a frequency change, widespread marketing, antenna improvement, permanent funding and structured programming. 97.7 KAFA became a permanent and powerful part of the propaganda arm of the US Air Force. That continues and is now maintained and has been maintained for 20 years after I left. It still has the same format. It still uses the same software (NexGen), they have the same segments, they do exactly what the structure is that I put in place.
I haven’t had any input into that since 2008 and it’s thriving: https://www.usafa.edu/radio/
That’s how you create a legacy, hard work, unique determination, and bringing people into a system such that they will maintain it irrespective of your input or not.
If you don’t do that, then nothing you do is going to last
Now you just find a way to pay Amazon lot's of money in advance. Maybe someone will build a company around this idea?
My family has a couple of family cookbooks where we've done something similar.
If you pay $5/month for 1 year, your posts will be archived forever.
> If we can't charge your card, your site goes into read only mode. Even if something catastrophic happens, your content will remain online.
[0] https://posthaven.com/pricing
The only correct answer to the question is (a) legal deposit with a national library (many take e-deposits these days, so you might not have to print it) or (b) print it on good paper or write it on a good cd and hope for the best
There is of course the silent other half of your question … does anyone really care about your accumulated life history that much ? sure your immediate family might, for a while, but one the bereavement period is over ?
This is kind of similar to BitTorrent or Filecoin, but the problem with them is that they're tied to the distribution medium. What you'd really want is something that can change with the times and isn't tied to any single backend.
How to incentivize people to continue hosting the content is another problem, but I predict that it shouldn't be too hard because of the constant falling cost of storage.